Speeches made during Parliamentary debates are recorded in Hansard. For ease of browsing we have grouped debates into individual, departmental and legislative categories.
These initiatives were driven by Lord Lilley, and are more likely to reflect personal policy preferences.
A Bill to establish a publicly owned body to provide insurance for home owners at cost against selling their homes to pay for elderly social care; and for connected purposes
A bill to establish an Office for Science Quality Assessment within the National Audit Office; and to authorise the Comptroller and Auditor-General to assess any research used as a basis of published policy by a public department
A Bill to require the National Health Service to be exempted from the provisions of international trade and investment agreements; and for connected purposes.
A Bill to consolidate and amend provisions about the House of Commons Members’ Fund.
The Bill failed to complete its passage through Parliament before the end of the session. This means the Bill will make no further progress.
Lord Lilley has not co-sponsored any Bills in the current parliamentary sitting
Under the Climate Change Act 2008, the Department’s Secretary of State makes appointments to the Climate Change Committee jointly with his devolved counterparts. The Committee Chair’s role was first advertised last summer. Due to the limited number of applicants demonstrating sufficient experience, the appointing parties agreed to re-advertise using executive search services. The updated advertisement is due to go live this month.
The role is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. In terms of process, the appointing parties follow the Governance Code for Public Appointments, including establishing an Advisory Assessment Panel that informs Ministers of progress throughout the competition.
Further to the written answer provided on 6 October (HL8377), the plot placed in the Library of the House uses data over 1926 – 2019. The 2020 value is not included in the fit of the GEV itself, as is standard scientific practice to avoid biasing the fit by the extreme value of interest. It is well established that the selection of a series in which a very large extreme has occurred means that the return time of this value is likely to be much larger than the length of the dataset itself. This means the time series would give an artificially low view of the return time compared to reality. However, as requested, we have provided an additional quantile-quantile plot that does include the 2020 value in the fit – which we provide subject to these caveats.
The assumption of stationarity of the residuals is well established in the peer reviewed literature. Recent examples of this can be found in the following papers:
Kew, Sarah F., Sjoukje Y. Philip, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Gerard van der Schrier, Friederike EL Otto, and Robert Vautard. "The exceptional summer heat wave in southern Europe 2017." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 100, no. 1 (2019): S49-S53.
Yiou, Pascal, Julien Cattiaux, Davide Faranda, Nikolay Kadygrov, Aglae Jézéquel, Philippe Naveau, Aurelien Ribes et al. "Analyses of the Northern European summer heatwave of 2018." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 1 (2020): S35-S40.
Leach, Nicholas J., Sihan Li, Sarah Sparrow, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Fraser C. Lott, Antje Weisheimer, and Myles R. Allen. "Anthropogenic influence on the 2018 summer warm spell in Europe: the impact of different spatio-temporal scales." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 1 (2020): S41-S46.
Further to the written answer provided on 6 October (HL8377), the plot placed in the Library of the House shows that the GEV distribution is a good fit to the data, which supports the assumption that the distribution of residuals may be adequately modelled as stationary.
The report’s sample size is large enough to justify the fitting method used in the analysis as daily temperature data at approximately one-year intervals are not significantly correlated from year to year over continental regions. The maximum daily temperature in a particular month or season in a particular year in a continental region does not serve as a good predictor of the maximum daily temperature in the same month or season in the following year (over and above the long-term effect of climate change) due to natural variability of the climate system. The June-July daily maximum temperature data over timescales from 1 day upwards shows no significant autocorrelation (correlation with itself across a period of time) above 1 week timescales and confirms that the 94 data points used in the report are independent, a sufficiently large number to justify the fitting method used in the analysis. The analysis in the report is based on peer reviewed methodology as set out in a paper by Van der Wiel et al. referenced in the report, which applied this fitting method to a dataset of a comparable size.
I have arranged for a copy to be placed in the Libraries of the House, along with explanatory text and supporting documents.
The analysis does not assume that all the months of June during 1926-2020 have the same statistical distribution for the highest of their daily temperature maxima at Verkhoyansk. Instead, the method involves modelling secular changes in the data by a covariance with smoothed Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) and first removing this to create a set of residuals that may be assumed to be stationary and to which a Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) fit is then made. This method, based on peer-reviewed literature, is set out in the linked methods document which accompanies the report.
We are not aware of any peer-reviewed scientific studies that predict the end of the human race in the next century as a result of climate change. The scientific consensus, as represented by the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, projects that climate change over this century and beyond will have increasingly negative impacts on human and natural systems, with the potential for impacts that are severe and, in some cases, irreversible. The evidence does not point to humanity going extinct because of climate change.
The government does not impose a cap on nurse training places. Higher Education Providers (HEPs) make decisions on their intakes, and these are based on demand from suitable candidates and the ability of education and healthcare systems to provide the necessary capacity (both academic and practise). HEPs receive funding to support the delivery of these courses from student fees, as well as additional support from the Strategic Priorities Grant.
We have committed to deliver 50,000 more nurses into the NHS by the end of this Parliament. We will achieve this through a combination of investing in and diversifying our training pipeline and recruiting and retaining more nurses in the NHS.
Since September 2020, all eligible nursing, midwifery and allied health profession students have received a non-repayable training grant of a minimum of £5,000 per academic year. Additional funding is also available for studying certain courses, for example mental health and learning disabilities nursing, with further financial support available to students for childcare, accommodation costs and travel costs.
This support package comes in addition to maintenance and tuition fee loans provided by the Student Loans Company. It enables healthcare students to focus on their studies and placements and helps alleviate financial pressures which students might be facing.
Health Education England (HEE) has invested £55 million in expanding clinical placements, including simulated learning capacity. This funding is being provided in addition to £180 million, spent each year by HEE on placements for around 120,000 nursing, midwifery and allied health professional students.
Sir James Bevan’s speech was underpinned by published evidence from a variety of national and international reports that includes the UK Climate Projections 2018 announced by the Secretary of State for Defra in November 2018. The Environment Agency has recently published research showing an upward trend in extreme floods at two-thirds of their river level monitoring stations and that this trend is 90% certain at over a fifth of locations.
The UK is party to a number of international agreements that provide for obligations and recommended practices around customs procedures and declarations, such as the Revised Kyoto Convention.
Obligations as to the precise form of the UK customs declarations for imports are established by the UK’s domestic legislation. There is no general exemption regarding the contents of customs declarations for goods being imported under a free trade agreement, including imports that are tariff free and quota free.
There is no evidence to suggest that electric vehicle fires are more likely to occur than petrol or diesel vehicle fires.
Electric vehicles are currently only transported by rail via the Eurotunnel. As the infrastructure manager of the Channel Tunnel and operator of its shuttle services, Eurotunnel is responsible for the safety of passengers and has to maintain risk assessments for its operations, including developing procedures specifically for the carriage of EVs. These are regularly assessed and challenged by the Channel Tunnel Safety Authority and their inspectors. The safety authorities also facilitate regular dialogue between Eurotunnel and the UK and French emergency services to review operating procedures.
Fire prevention, fire detection, and fire fighting in electric vehicles is a developing area and the Government continually reviews its guidance and regulations in step with the development of best practice.
The Personal Social Services Research Unit (PSSRU) at the University of Kent estimates that the cost of training an individual doctor from the beginning of medical school through to the end of the foundation training programme is approximately £327,000. This includes salaries paid to the trainee during the foundation stage while they are working, living expenses and other costs of training. This includes costs borne by both the wider National Health Service and the individual undertaking the training.
PSSRU estimate the cost of training a nurse to be approximately £67,000. These estimates are published in their Unit Costs of Health and Social Care Manual.
The maximum amount that can be borrowed in student loans by an individual medical student is between £74,000 and £93,000 for a five-year course, depending on the individual’s living arrangements. From year five of an undergraduate course, and from year two of a graduate-entry course, medical students can also access the NHS Bursary. This is non-repayable and comprises payment for tuition fees and, where eligible, further grants and allowances.
The maximum amount that can be borrowed in student loans by an individual nursing student is between £53,000 and £67,000 for a three-year course, depending on the student’s living arrangements. In addition, since September 2020, all eligible nursing, midwifery and allied health profession students have received a non-repayable training grant of a minimum of £5,000 per academic year.
All seven recommendations in Leadership for a collaborative and inclusive future have been accepted by the Government. This includes positive equality, diversity and inclusion action, where the report encourages the use of the Everyday Discrimination Scale as a useful tool to support leaders and teams to address discrimination in the workplace.
The scale was developed by a Harvard University professor, which has been used globally to address issues through specific questions and considerations. However, the use of the scale is not being mandated in the National Health Service and social care. The Department considers this as one of a number of tools available to health and social care workers to ensure a welcoming and supportive environment.
The information requested on money spent on recruiting nurses from overseas is not collected centrally.
The following table shows the number of applications made to a nursing course and subsequent acceptances in England in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Data on the number of applications refused is not held centrally.
2019 2020 2021
Applications 128,810 145,925 181,645
Acceptances 23,630 29,740 30,185
Source: Universities and Colleges Admissions Service undergraduate sector-level end of cycle data resources 2021.
Note:
An applicant can make up to five separate course applications. Only one place can be accepted.
This information is not collected in the format requested. While the National Health Service Electronic Staff Record collects self-reported data on nationality, this does not show where staff were trained or the country in which they were a resident at the time of recruitment.
The assessment of the capture rate was made from a mathematical model developed by Public Health England (PHE). The 7% capture is for those infections in asymptomatic travellers that were infected before travel and were incubating infection during travel.
This finding is for asymptomatic travellers irrespective of the prevalence of infections in the country that the traveller is arriving from and is independent of the period of the year that it is applied to. This is based on the high sensitivity and specificity of current laboratory-based Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and PHE has not identified any technology that has better detection rates that would change these findings.
Testing in care homes is an important part of keeping staff and residents safe in the COVID-19 response. It means those who test positive can be isolated, reducing the number of people who can spread the virus and protecting the most vulnerable.
PHE has conducted a number of prevalence studies in health care workers using reverse transcription-PCR which informs assessment of potentially infected staff. The assessment of the risk posed by visitors to care-homes is part of the SAGE social-care sub-group’s purview and will be reported in due course.
The development of a COVID-19 vaccine is at the early stages but progressing rapidly. The Government is working to ensure the United Kingdom has the manufacturing capability to produce these vaccines at the levels the UK needs. To do this, a new cross-Government vaccines taskforce has been set up, reporting to the Secretaries of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Health and Social Care as well as Sir Patrick Vallance. It brings together Government, industry, academics, funding agencies and other partners to make rapid decisions in order to accelerate vaccine development in the UK.
The UK Government does not offer advice on this specific matter to British travellers.
The Windsor Framework establishes new freedoms for the UK to set VAT rates and thresholds in Northern Ireland that go far beyond those available before EU Exit. That includes the ability to zero rate additional goods for VAT.
The Windsor Framework establishes new freedoms for the UK to set VAT rates and thresholds in Northern Ireland that go far beyond those available before EU Exit. That includes the ability to zero rate additional goods for VAT.
The Windsor Framework establishes new freedoms for the UK to set VAT rates and thresholds in Northern Ireland that go far beyond those available before EU Exit. That includes the ability to zero rate additional goods for VAT.
All passengers arriving in the UK at passport control are checked against Home Office databases. The majority of these are checked against our systems before they even travel, through the collection of advanced passenger information (API).
Border Force defines General Aviation (GA) and General Maritime (GM) as any arrival into the UK that is not operating to a specific and published schedule and departing at both small airports and marinas with no Border Force presence, and at major airports where Border Force officers are located. Both EU/EEA citizens (1) and visa nationals (2) may arrive at General Aviation or General Maritime ports
There is a requirement for advance passenger information to be submitted for General Aviation and General Maritime arrivals. When the relevant information is received, and there is a requirement to examine the passenger, Border Force Officers will be deployed.